How to Talk Dirty and Influence People Read online

  A portion of the proceeds from this book will go directly to the Lenny Bruce Memorial foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit.

  Copyright © 2016 by Kitty Bruce

  Preface copyright © 2016 by Lewis Black

  Foreword copyright © 2016 by Howard Reich

  First published by Playboy Enterprises, Inc. in 1965

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-0-306-82530-9 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press,

  an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  I dedicate this book to all the followers of Christ and his teachings; in particular to a true Christian—Jimmy Hoffa—because he hired ex-convicts as, I assume, Christ would have.

  Contents

  Preface by Lewis Black

  Original Foreword by Kenneth Tynan

  Foreword to the 2016 Edition by Howard Reich

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  PREFACE BY LEWIS BLACK

  I wish I could remember when I first heard of Lenny Bruce. It may have been from The Realist, a magazine he wrote for. I do remember asking my dad about him. He had seen him perform. He thought he was very funny. So I read his book in my teens, and I would never be the same. Like Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Dick Gregory, and later George Carlin and Richard Pryor, it fed a growing rebellious streak in me. He was funny, irreverent, and his scathing attacks on organized religion, politics, the death penalty, race, and the ways in which we have chosen to live made me laugh and made me think. It changed the way I looked at life. And it planted the seed in my angry brain that would eventually lead me to a career expressing my own dissatisfaction with the world. He took me to places I hadn’t imagined possible. I’m asked occasionally if I’m trying to change people’s minds with my comedy and I always say I don’t think about changing minds; I think about getting laughs. Changing a mind is collateral damage if you will. I’m sure that’s the way Lenny saw it. But Lenny wasn’t just getting laughs; he was getting arrested for his jokes.

  He was considered a dirty comic because he used dirty words (many of the ones Carlin made famous). I didn’t consider them dirty words; I thought they were adult words. As I’ve discovered, lots of people still consider them dirty, and back when Lenny was tossing them about they were considered even dirtier. The bad words, as some folks still stupidly believe, didn’t get him the laughs, his jokes did. It was the words that got him locked up. They were an excuse to punish him. The real reason he was deemed a threat was because his comedy went too far for the times, way too far. Even now, in many parts of this country, fifty some odd years later, in the twenty-first century no less, some of his routines would be seen as going too far. He didn’t just push the boundaries; he obliterated them. His comedy was beyond edgy; it was shocking. It’s one thing to say what people are thinking but afraid to say. It’s another to say things that up until that time had been unthinkable, let alone speak them aloud.

  This book gives us a solid context of what Lenny lived through and what he had to face. (And to think today we complain about the politically correct environment that makes comedy difficult? Are you kidding me?) We are talking about not even being able to tell your jokes without the threat of imprisonment.

  Lenny’s comedy is important because he is one of those who transitioned us from the family friendly comedy of the time to the comedy of improvisation, honesty, and the deeply personal. He put it all on the line. Lenny confronted and challenged his audience with hard dark truths wrapped in twisted scenarios of his own invention. It took insanity, courage, and genius—and not necessarily in that order—to look for laughs in corners where no one had looked before.

  There isn’t a comic who has worked since Lenny who doesn’t owe him a debt of gratitude. Every time someone swears on a stage or runs counter to the prevailing thoughts of the time, it is because Lenny kicked the door down. (And Mr. Carlin made sure it stayed open.)

  Enough of my bullshit, read the fucking book. You’ll be glad you did.

  —LEWIS BLACK

  New York City, April 2016

  Lewis Black is a New York Times-bestselling author, stand-up comedian, actor, and playwright. Besides appearing regularly on The Daily Show (in his own segment, “Back in Black”), he has written and starred in a string of successful HBO and Comedy Central specials and one-man Broadway shows. He has won two Grammys, an Emmy and the American Comedy Award for Funniest Male Stand-up Comedian. He lives in New York City.

  ORIGINAL FOREWORD BY KENNETH TYNAN

  Constant, abrasive irritation produces the pearl: it is a disease of the oyster. Similarly—according to Gustave Flaubert—the artist is a disease of society. By the same token, Lenny Bruce is a disease of America. The very existence of comedy like his is evidence of unease in the body politic. Class chafes against class, ignorance against intelligence, puritanism against pleasure, majority against minority, easy hypocrisy against hard sincerity, white against black, jingoism against internationalism, price against value, sale against service, suspicion against trust, death against life—and out of all these collisions and contradictions there emerges the troubled voice of Lenny Bruce, a night-club Cassandra bringing news of impending chaos, a tightrope walker between morality and nihilism, a pearl miscast before swine. The message he bears is simple and basic: whatever releases people and brings them together is good, and whatever confines and separates them is bad. The worst drag of all is war; in didactic moments Bruce likes to remind his audience that “‘Thou shalt not kill’ means just that.” Although he occasionally invokes Christ as source material, I think he would applaud a statement recently made by Wayland Young, an English writer and agnostic, in a book called Eros Denied:

  “Christian and post-Christian and Communist culture is a eunuch; pornography is his severed balls; thermonuclear weapons are his staff of office. If there is anything sadder than a eunuch it is his balls; if there is anything more deadly than impotence it is murder.”

&nb
sp; If it is sick to agree with that, then God preserve us from health.

  This may be the time to point out the primary fact about Bruce, which is that he is extremely funny. It is easy to leave that out when writing about him—to pass over the skill with which he plays his audience as an angler plays a big-game fish, and the magical timing, born of burlesque origins and jazz upbringing, that triggers off the sudden, startled yell of laughter. But he is seldom funny without an ulterior motive. You squirm as you smile. With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means. What begins as pure hilarity may end in self-accusation. When, for example, he tells the story of the unhappily married couple who achieve togetherness in the evening of their lives by discovering that they both have gonorrhea, your first reaction is laughter; but when you go on to consider your own far-from-perfect marriage, held together (it may be) by loveless habit or financial necessity or fear of social disapproval—all of which are motives less concrete and intimate than venereal disease—your laughter may cool off into a puzzled frown of self-scrutiny. You begin to reflect that there are worse fates than the clap; that a curable physical sickness may even be preferable, as a source of togetherness, to a social or spiritual sickness for which no cure is available. And thus another taboo is dented.

  Bruce is the sharpest denter of taboos at present active in show business. Alone among those who work the clubs, he is a true iconoclast. Others josh, snipe and rib; only Bruce demolishes. He breaks through the barrier of laughter to the horizon beyond, where the truth has its sanctuary. People say he is shocking and they are quite correct. Part of his purpose is to force us to redefine what we mean by “being shocked.” We all feel impersonally outraged by racialism; but when Bruce mimics a white liberal who meets a Negro at a party and instantly assumes that he must know a lot of people in show business, we feel a twinge of recognition and personal implication. Poverty and starvation, which afflict more than half of the human race, enrage us—if at all—only in a distant, generalized way; yet we are roused to a state of vengeful fury when Bruce makes public use of harmless, fruitful syllables like “come” (in the sense of orgasm) and “fuck.” Where righteous indignation is concerned, we have clearly got our priorities mixed up. The point about Bruce is that he wants us to be shocked, but by the right things; not by four-letter words, which violate only convention, but by want and deprivation, which violate human dignity. This is not to deny that he has a disenchanted view of mankind as a whole. Even his least Swiftian bit, the monolog about a brash and incompetent American comic who tries to conquer the London Palladium, ends with the hero winning the cheers of the audience by urging them, in a burst of sadistic inspiration, to “screw the Irish.” But the cynicism is just a façade. Bruce has the heart of an unfrocked evangelist.

  I first saw him six years ago in a cellar room under the Duane Hotel in New York. Lean and pallid, with close-cropped black hair, he talked about Religions, Inc., a soft-selling ecumenical group on Madison Avenue whose main purpose was to render the image of Billy Graham indistinguishable from that of Pope John. (“Listen, Johnny, when you come out to the Coast, wear the big ring.”) Clutching a hand mike, he slouched around a tiny dais, free-associating like mad; grinning as he improvised, caring as he grinned, seldom repeating in the second show what he said in the first, and often conducting what amounted to a rush job of psychoanalysis on the audience he was addressing. He used words as a jazz musician uses notes, going off into fantastic private cadenzas and digressions, and returning to his theme just when you thought he had lost track of it forever. I saw him at the Duane four times, with four separate groups of friends. Some found him offensive—a reaction they smartly concealed by calling him boring. Others thought him self-indulgent, because he felt his way into the audience’s confidence by means of exploratory improvisation, instead of plunging straight into rehearsed routines. Among my guests, he was not universally liked. “Where’s Lenny Bruce?” “Down the Duane,” so ran a popular riposte. During the Duane engagement I met him for the first time—an archetypal night person, hypersensitive, laconic and withdrawn. Terry Southern once said that a hipster was someone who had deliberately decided to kill a part of himself in order to make life bearable. He knows that by doing this he is cutting himself off from many positive emotions as well as the negative, destructive ones he seeks to avoid; but on balance he feels that the sacrifice is worth while. By this definition Bruce was (and is) authentically, indelibly hip.

  In the years that followed, it was not Bruce but my friends who improved. One by one they began to discover that they had always admired him. I recalled a saying of Gertrude Stein’s: “A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.” Bruce was fully, quiveringly conscious, and audiences in Chicago and San Francisco started to respond to his manner and his message. So did the police of these and other great cities, rightly detecting in this uncompromising outsider a threat to conventional mores. Arrests began, on narcotics and obscenity charges, but Bruce pressed on, a long-distance runner whose loneliness was now applauded by liberals everywhere, including those tardy converts, my chums in Manhattan. Mort Sahl, brilliant but essentially nonsubversive, had long been their pet satirist; but the election of John F. Kennedy robbed Sahl of most of his animus, which had been directed toward Eisenhower from the lame left wing of the Democratic Party. It became clear that Bruce was tapping a vein of satire that went much deeper than the puppet warfare of the two-party system. Whichever group was in power, his criticisms remained valid. Myself, I wished he had broadened his viewpoint by a little selective reading of Marx as well as Freud; but that, I suppose, is too much to expect of any comic operating west of Eastport, Maine.

  In the spring of 1962, he paid his first and (thus far) only visit to London, where he appeared for a few explosive weeks at The Establishment, a Soho night club devoted to satire and run by Peter Cook of Beyond the Fringe. Clad in a black tunic sans lapels, as worn by the late Pandit Nehru, he roamed out on stage in his usual mood of tormented derision; 90 minutes later there was little room for doubt that he was the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language our inhibited island had ever hired to beguile its citizens. I made notes of the ideas he toyed with on opening night, and herewith reproduce them:

  “The smoking of marijuana should be encouraged because it does not induce lung cancer. Children ought to watch pornographic movies: it’s healthier than learning about sex from Hollywood. Venereal disease is news only when poor people catch it. Publicity is stronger than sanity: given the right PR, armpit hair on female singers could become a national fetish. Fascism in America is kept solvent by the left-wing hunger for persecution: ‘Liberals will buy anything any bigot writes.’ If Norman Thomas, the senior American Socialist, were to be elected President, he would have to find a minority to hate. It might conceivably be midgets—in which case his campaign slogan would run: ‘Smack a midget for Norm.’”

  He went on to talk about the nuances of race relations, with special emphasis on whites who cherish the Negro cause but somehow never have Negroes to dinner: about a prison movie to end them all (starring Ann Dvorak, Charles Bickford and Nat Pendleton) in which the riot is quelled by a chaplin named Father Flotsky; about the difficulties of guiltless masturbation, and the psychological duplicity (“It’s a horny hoax”) involved in sleeping enjoyably with a prostitute; about pain of many kinds, and laughter, and dying. At times he drawled and mumbled too privately, lapsing into a lexicon of Yiddish phrases borrowed from the showbiz world that reared him. But by the end of the evening he had crashed through frontiers of language and feeling that I had hitherto thought impregnable. The British comedian Jonathan Miller, who watched the performance in something like awe, agreed with me afterward that Bruce was a bloodbath where Beyond the Fringe had been a pinprick. We were dealing with something formerly unknown in Britain: an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that h
e could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private.

  His trust was misplaced. Scarcely a night passed during his brief sojourn at The Establishment without vocal protests from offended customers, sometimes backed up by clenched fists; and this, at a members-only club, is rare in London. The actress Siobhan McKenna came with a party and noisily rose to leave in the middle of Bruce’s act; it seems she was outraged by his attitude toward the Roman Church. On her way out Peter Cook sought to remonstrate with her, whereupon she seized his tie while one of her escorts belted him squarely on the nose. “These are Irish hands,” cried Miss McKenna dramatically, “and they’re clean!” “This is an English face,” replied Mr. Cook crisply, “and it’s bleeding.” A few days later a brisk, pink-faced sextet of young affluents from London’s stockbroker belt booked a ringside table. They sat, half-heartedly sniggering, through jokes about money-making, sexual contact with Negroes, onanism as an alternative to V.D., and genetic hazards proceeding from fall-out. Suddenly Bruce ventured on to the subject of cigarettes and lung cancer. At once, as if in obedience to some tribal summons, the brisk, pink, stockbroker host sprang to his feet. “All right,” he said tersely, “Susan, Charles, Sonia! Cancer! Come on! Cancer! All out!” And meekly, in single file, they marched out through the door. Bruce kept tape recordings of both the McKenna and the cancer demonstrations, and made unsparing use of them on subsequent evenings.

  At the end of his engagement he was rushed out of the country with the conservative press baying at his heels. The following year, Peter Cook applied for permission to bring him back to London. The Home Secretary brusquely turned down the application; Bruce, it seemed, was classified as an undesirable alien. (Off stage, he appears to have behaved quite desirably, apart from a rumored occasion when the manager of a London hotel, awakened by complaining guests, strode into Bruce’s room at four A.M. to find him conducting a trio of blondes whom he had taught to sing “Please love me, Lenny” in three-part harmony.) In 1963 the Earl of Harewood invited him to take part in an International Drama Conference at the Edinburgh Festival. Despite the august source of the invitation, the Home Office once again said no; and as I write, the edict still holds. Lenny Bruce is too wild an import for British officialdom to stomach.